


only time tells me (more than i hoped)

by someonelsesheart



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Eventual Relationships, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-11
Updated: 2016-08-11
Packaged: 2018-08-08 03:03:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7740865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/someonelsesheart/pseuds/someonelsesheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She knocks on the door shortly after five. Clarke is running late and almost trips over herself to answer it, standing there with half of her makeup done and her shirt hanging off her shoulder. </p><p>“You look beautiful,” Lexa says, and Clarke kisses her. </p><p>That’s how it starts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	only time tells me (more than i hoped)

She wakes up slowly. Carefully, as if she's already waiting for something to happen, as if waking up is an exercise unto itself. She wakes up slowly, unfolding like a cat, and Clarke can’t help but watch her. She can never help watching her.

“Have you been watching me the whole time I was asleep?” drawls Lexa, and Clarke looks away. She doesn’t answer.

Outside, the curtain of night is lifting off the city. Clarke picks up her mug of coffee and walks over to the balcony, letting the cool air brush her skin. It’s loud already, the city buzzing to life. She struggles to miss home, the ruralness of it; in many ways, the noise _is_ her home.

Lexa is home.

“How long have you been awake?” asks Lexa, wrapping her arms around Clarke’s stomach.

“A while. I had a nightmare.”

“Bad?”

“Pretty shit,” Clarke says, and she remembers the heat of the dream, the flames, the suffocating. Funny that, after all this time, after her father’s death and her mother’s betrayal, the worst thing her mind can create is losing Lexa.

*

Clarke wasn’t always in love with Lexa. There was a time when she hadn’t thought she could love anybody, like her heart was made of something more like stone. She had contented herself with it, even learnt to love it. Sure, love was nice, but nothing could hurt you if you didn’t love anything enough to let it.

She had loved Finn once, with his carefree smile and the way he held her tightly, like he wanted to keep her safe. He had left her waiting for him like an idiot, while he was already off dating a new girl.

Love got you hurt. It wasn’t an unfamiliar notion.

Which wasn’t to say she didn’t _date_ – and she did, falling in temporary infatuation with a lot of boys and girls, who would fuck her and love her but who couldn’t touch her in any way that mattered.

She meets Lexa on the first day back to college. She’s kind of reading her notes, kind of thinking about to have for lunch. Octavia has class, but she could go for some fries on her own. That’s not sad, right? Probably not. Maybe.

There’s a beautiful girl with sharp features and long hair tied back pacing nearby, talking on the phone and sounding increasingly agitated. She drops one of her books without realising, and Clarke almost leaps up to pick it up and pass it back to her.

The girl looks surprised, taking the book with raised eyebrows. To the person on the other end she says, “I’ll call you back,” to lots of shouting, and hangs up. “Thank you,” she says to Clarke, peering down at the book. “I would be lost without this one. It cost me a week’s worth of groceries.”

Clarke grins. “I know how that is.” She extends a hand. “I’m Clarke.”

Lexa takes it, cautiously. “Lexa. Lexa Woods.” She clears her throat. “I was actually about to get lunch, would you like to join me?”

Clarke tries not to punch the air. “Yeah, that sounds. That sounds great.”

She punches the air anyway, when Lexa’s back is turned. The only person who sees her is some kid who looks like he barely passed puberty, and he looks concerned. She winks at him and saunters after Lexa.

*

Clarke has an ugliness in her mind. It’s a bad way of putting it – and her therapist _definitely_ wouldn’t approve – but it’s the way she thinks of it. There are monsters that keep her alive at night, that grip onto her and don’t let go, who have loved her longer than anybody else ever has. Her demons live in her body and keep her breaking her own heart, over and over again.

The first night she spends with Lexa, she’s awake long after midnight. The only light through Clarke’s blinds is the moonlight, cool on Lexa’s bare back.

Clarke’s father is a professor at the college, and their family has always been very wealthy, which is why she has an apartment just off campus while she finishes her medical degree. She had argued – that it was spoiled, that she didn’t need it – but she has a job and she has worked since she was fifteen, which her parents pointed out. Let them do this one thing for her.

She slips silently out of bed and pads across to the balcony, where the cotton curtains are blowing lightly in the wind. She shuts the door after her and sits there, looking out over the city. It’s freezing, verging on icy, but the pain of the cold grounds her. She can’t stop herself from lighting a cigarette, blowing the smoke out into the cold air.

She’s out there for a while before the door clicks open behind her and Lexa sleepily says, “I thought you left me.”

“In my own apartment? A few mixed messages there.”

Lexa laughs, softly, and sits opposite Clarke. “I did not know you smoked,” she says, but she doesn’t sound _too_ disgusted.

“I don’t,” Clarke says. Then amends, “Well, only when I’m stressed.”

“You’re stressed? Why?”

“No reason,” Clarke murmurs, looking at the lines of Lexa’s palms on the glass table between them, the way they are scarred and rough and beautiful. She wonders if she can love Lexa like she loved Finn, fully and scarily and like Lexa’s the best thing that’s ever happened to her.

See, she looks at Lexa, and she thinks she’s beautiful, and so precious, something she cares about. But she could probably leave right now and it wouldn’t hurt her too much, because she’s built so many walls she’s barely even began chipping down.

*

“Do you even want a relationship?” Lexa asks one day, sitting in a cramped coffee shop in the heart of New York.

“Not really,” Clarke says.

“That’s okay.”

“I like you, though,” she says, as if she needs to prove something. “I’m just not sure right now.”

“I understand,” Lexa says. “I’m not going to leave, Clarke.”

Except everybody leaves, and that’s kind of a fact of life. Clarke doesn’t even mean it in a pessimistic way; it’s like the way the moon changes, the way the tides pass. People will leave, and others will replace them, and that’s the cycle of things.

“Okay,” Clarke says, like maybe she’s hoping for something and she doesn’t quite know what yet.

*

They stop sleeping together, just like that. Clarke doesn’t particularly mind – she likes sex, likes the feel of somebody’s body beneath yours – but she knows sex can too often involve feelings, and feelings aren’t a great idea right now.

Octavia comes over after work one day and they share a bottle of vodka in silence. It tastes disgusting, but it was all Clarke had in the house and she wants to be drunk right now.

“Lincoln might want to break up,” Octavia says eventually, the words bitter on her tongue.

Clarke says, “I’m not seeing Lexa anymore.”

Octavia looks at her, and kind of smiles. “We’re a fucking mess, aren’t we?” she says, almost like it’s an accomplishment, and she passes Clarke the vodka.

Clarke can’t help but laugh, because it’s funny, isn’t it. She thinks – she hopes – Octavia and Lincoln will be okay, because theirs is a love that lasts. Clarke has never known anything like that, and part of her wishes she could feel that for Lexa, the sort of love that changes your life.

“We fucking are,” Clarke says, and the thought’s weirdly uplifting.

*

Clarke drinks a lot to forget. Which is ironic, but the demons are less likely to get to her when she’s tipsy and laughing over dumb dog videos on Facebook. Raven calls it Lonely Drinking, but Clarke knows for a fact she does it too, so it’s okay. They’re all messes, but it’s okay.

The problem with Lexa is this – Clarke doesn’t love her. She doesn’t. But when Lexa messages her drunk when she’s out drinking with Anya, all Clarke can think is the way Lexa is when she’s been drinking, calm and flirty. Surely she’s not the only person who’s ever seen that look on Lexa; surely there are girls who would kill to touch her, to love her.

The thought makes Clarke feel sick.

That night, Octavia turns up at her house, face stony.

“We broke up,” she says, and she doesn’t cry, because she’s _Octavia,_ but Clarke somehow feels like this is worse.

They sit on Clarke’s balcony and drink and smoke, and Lexa messages her late that night saying that the night was pretty boring. When Clarke jokes _meet anybody interesting_? Clarke can almost feel how amused she is, and she texts back a sure _No._

Clarke shouldn’t be relieved, but she is.

This is how it starts.

*

They spend nights together, innocent ones, watching movies or walking through the city late at night or just co-existing. It’s natural, existing like this with somebody else, and sometimes the silence begins to fill up the room in a way that makes her question herself.

She realises one night when there’s a party that she has to skip because she has an exam the next day, and Lexa goes with a group of people, including Octavia and Raven. She’s sitting drinking coffee and trying to concentrate, but all she can think about is the way her phone is silent, and she has no messages from Lexa.

Around 11pm she receives a text that says only _wish yu were here_ and then her phone starts ringing, and she can’t do anything but answer it.

“Clarke,” Lexa slurs. “Clarke, how are you.”

Clarke laughs softly. “I thought you were enjoying yourself.”

“Can’t really,” Lexa says. “Without you. Can’t really.”

“You haven’t found a girl to distract you?” Clarke says, meaning it as a joke, but it comes out too serious.

“Told you,” says Lexa. “Can’t.”

Clarke smiles, and Lexa tells her about the drama of the party, and she falls asleep like that, head pillowed on her notes, Lexa’s voice in her ear.

*

Lexa comes over a week later, under the pretence of helping Clarke celebrate finishing her exams. She brings a bottle of tequila, which Lexa loathes but Clarke drinks too much of, which is a sweet gesture in itself.

She knocks on the door shortly after five. Clarke is running late and almost trips over herself to answer it, standing there with half of her makeup done and her shirt hanging off her shoulder.

“You look beautiful,” Lexa says, and Clarke kisses her.

That's how it really starts.

*

Clarke asks Lexa to be her girlfriend on the first day of winter, and then proceeds to completely freak out over it. She doesn’t talk to Lexa for two days, not answering her calls.

On the second day she calls Raven crying, talking about Finn and how it’s gonna get fucked up, and how she doesn’t know how to love people and it’s _different_ and _fuck._ See, that’s her biggest fear – her feelings for Lexa don’t match her ones for Finn, which were furious and beautiful and fast; they’re longer-lasting and sweeter and gentler. What if that’s not love at all?

 “Clarke,” says Raven, gently, “you’re a different person now. He hurt you, and you haven’t trusted anybody properly since then. We both know that. _But_ –”

“I trust you,” Clarke mumbles.

“Not like you want to trust Lexa,” she says. “It’s different. You’d trust me to be there if she broke your heart, but you’ve gotta trust her _not_ to break your heart.”

Clarke isn’t sure what to say to that.

“I don’t know what to do,” Clarke says, her voice small.

“Is that such a huge problem?” Raven says. “Think about it, Clarke.” And she hangs up on her.

Clarke cries for at least two hours, and then sits out on the balcony, decidedly doesn’t drink or smoke, and texts Lexa. _Want to hang out tonight?_

 _Okay,_ is all Lexa says. Clarke looks up at the stars and thinks about how they all die one day, and probably so do relationships, and maybe that’s not a terrible thing.

*

It works out. Somehow.

Clarke has a temper just like her mother, and Lexa still won’t talk about her family, left behind in her hometown. There’s a lot of silences between them, gaps only time will fix. Clarke is too protective and struggles with Lexa’s friendship with her ex Costia, and Lexa struggles to understand why it’s a problem, and sometimes the silences turn to panic and it hurts.

But it’s something.

It’s something.

*

“A nightmare about what?” asks Lexa.

“Just you,” Clarke says, because she’s nothing if not honest. “Losing you.”

Lexa’s face closes off immediately, and Clarke can’t help but flinch. Lexa immediately softens and she pulls Clarke in, pressing her lips to her hair.

“You’re not going to lose me.”

“You can’t know that,” Clarke says, which is true, and Lexa can’t really contest that.

“No,” Lexa says, “but I know that I love you.”

They watch the sun rise in silence, as Clarke’s coffee goes cold. She doesn’t really care – in that moment, despite the persistent grip of the nightmare, she feels absolute peace.

 

**Author's Note:**

> u can follow me at dontholdthiswarinside.tumblr.com : )


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